CDN performance can make or break a website. If your CDN isn’t performing as expected, your site will load slowly and downloads will take an age. Content delivery network providers must therefore constantly invest in their infrastructure to ensure their CDN performance keeps up with the expectations of their clients.

CDN performance has been at the heart of a recent enhancement of capabilities by Akamai, one of the world’s leading CDN providers. They have announced that they are introducing special SaaS (software-as-a-service) provider options, including new features and capabilities to improve the efficiency, performance and security of the CDN services they offer to SaaS providers.

Known simply as the SaaS Provider Option, this suite of CDN performance capabilities specifically address issues unique to SaaS providers. The service will allow customers to cut their on-boarding times, reduce operational costs, speed time-to-market, leverage SSL security in a highly scalable manner and gain deeper customer insights. The new capabilities is touted as providing value in three key areas: faster provisioning, granular reporting and user-based billing.

CDN Performance for the Future

These changes are key for Akamai’s ongoing business plans, given that research by IDC claims that by 2018, over $1 of every $5 spent on packaged software, and over $1 of every $4 spent on applications, will be consumed via the cloud. Furthermore, about 30% of all new business software purchases will be of service-enabled software, and cloud software will constitute about 20.5% of all software sold and about 19.0% of all applications spending.

Speaking of the developments, Mike Afergan, senior vice president and general manager, Web Experience Business Unit at Akamai, said that "consumers of SaaS applications expect their applications to be accessible, perform well, and be as secure as possible. Akamai has been delivering on these requirements for SaaS providers and their customers for several years now. With our new SaaS Provider Option, Akamai is combining the performance, optimization and security capabilities for which the company is well known with new capabilities designed specifically to help our SaaS customers run their businesses more efficiently."